Why is GW2 pvp itself so toxic and anti-fun?

This games pvp just breeds frustration and is the epitome of anti-fun in some matches. I mean if devs were going for the worst pvp gameplay award, they surely nailed that by a mile. I've been playing off/on since release and it still blows my mind how I can only manage to last a day maybe two of pvp before I rather log off before I punch my computer and wish the person on the other end eat a bag of kittens.

This has nothing to do with wins or losses, who cares dead game. It is the garbage you have to put up with which angers you even after a victory feeling exhausted and annoyed because you ponder how someone can design a class so horrible to play against. I think we all know which classes and which builds make you wanna blow your brains out, so there is not even any need to mention them. Devs should be well aware.

I doubt this game has a future in pvp, if they're even keeping at eye on it at this point or just given up, slow down on this horrendous design. Don't need millions of invulnerbles , evades , invis, block. Make those things more rare and reintroduce skill to the game.

Fighting on point, or as I like to call it, dying on point. Why is aoe so out of control? lol its truly comical how much aoe is in this game, brainless and effective, the GW2 way™

The whole combat design has gone to waste in pvp and it's sad it could be so much better. Before your pathetic attempts at balance you should sooner look at adjusting the very design of your classes and combat in pvp.. make it, idk.. fun?

Captains log stardate 10/9/2018.. I wrote a blog on the pvp forums. mathias out. flame on friends.

As far as mmos i think its still the most fun and well designed combat system. No other mmo comes close to gw2 pvp. You want real pvp where it's about player skill? Go play a pvp game.

On top of that pvp in this game is also my favorite mode. 90% of my time is in pvp.

Is balance good in this game? No. Do the devs really support pvp? No.

Go from there.

Players are so toxic mainly due to raw ignorance. The learning curve in Conquest is strange in GW2 and I notice the saltiest players are the ones that don't understand what's going on "OMG Y U NOT RES ME WHILE I GET CLEAVED BY 4 PEOPLE?" as an example. Then there is just plain apathy that goes with it, players who don't want to accept plain good advice but continue to get pissed off each and every time they commit to the same mistakes. As a runner up to the above two reasons, you have the way the Glicko algorithm works "win a match +4, lose a match -25" it feels bad man, especially in solo/duo only when you play with completely random players with random team comps, that widely contribute to if the match is a win or lose. And that's not even to bring up the absolutely ridiculous amount of unchecked win trading that goes on.

But uh yup, that's why.

Because being toxic in matches doesn't get punished.

Its simple there are two types of players in pvp right now farming gold, Those WHO know how to play or those WHO THINK they know how to play.....i try to advice best i can, & that alone can be taken as toxic, because many think they know it all allreadyi place the BLAME firmly @ Anet feet, the lack of training in any of the BASIC objectives in the lobby is mind blowing..... how hard can it be to place a cappble point in the Arena for ppl to train on, maybe even a msg on screen announcing the player in control, like the old Hall of Heroes msgs from GW1Lets face it u can train on fighting any class u like in the lobby..... YET.... u can win games without killing a single person.......IF u know HOW points are scoredas for that rubbish algorithm, why cant u group teams by games played.... all u do by sticking u with 4 new pvp players is frustrate & annoy loyal pvpers into not wanting to play any more, like myself, i loved pvp in GW1 & gw2 then gold farmers came n messed it all up, BOTS hackers NOOBS take u'r pick....ITS killing the community.Now im off to play hello kitty island for some real competitive game play....TOMO :-D

@Tomo.8324 said:i place the BLAME firmly @ Anet feet, the lack of training in any of the BASIC objectives in the lobby is mind blowing.....

Well, yeah, but there's also an unskippable intro window which appears before every competitive match and briefs you on the map's objectives.

I think its from mostly because of the ranking system. It is a very frustating rng game atm, when you rank up if you get decent team mates, and down if you don't. With soloq the scoring algorithm have to consider personal performance way much more than group performance. Strength of a team is not an additive, it's a multiplicative formula, where a single bad thief or a bunker can lead to loosing, and a very decent thief or a bunker is not enough for winning. But the question is, if I'm a decent thief with top offense and no death, then why should I drop to low gold when rng not loves me anymore, or they screwed up matchmaking again.

It's because people have a need to play the most ridiculous build that ever exists so they can have fun while denying everyone else's fun. The biggest issue is that in this game, cheesy builds are super annoying compared to other games cheeses... I really think that the devs do this on purpose, they really want the game to be unbalanced - otherwise they would try to fix it. Not just do some random changes (yes. all those balance patches seems to be more random than anything else)

@Zawn.9647 said:It's because people have a need to play the most ridiculous build that ever exists so they can have fun while denying everyone else's fun. The biggest issue is that in this game, cheesy builds are super annoying compared to other games cheeses... I really think that the devs do this on purpose, they really want the game to be unbalanced - otherwise they would try to fix it. Not just do some random changes (yes. all those balance patches seems to be more random than anything else)

This is the point I was trying to get across. Why do builds in GW2 feel so atrocious to fight against? I do not get anywhere near the level of frustration in other MMOs.

The only up side to GW2 pvp is there is no gear grind, that is literally the ONE good thing about it, otherwise it's the cancer king of MMO pvp. Esports already failed and balance is clearly not on the table so why not, at the very least, create a fun pvp environment?

Atm it's good for something to jump into like maybe once a month for a few matches but prolonged exposure and I need chemotherapy. A game with such good combat mechanics should not be a spamtastic garbage experience wasted on brainless classes playstyles and aoe that never should exist in the first place.

Did ANet seriously think active clones could ever possibly make it into esports btw? That is atrocious design that no one can take seriously not to mention confusing af for viewers I can't believe they are still pushing this retarded mechanic. Just make them GW1 mes and be done with it ffs.

How about DE? Who thought that would be fun to play against in pvp? is pvp even a topic at ANet anymore or did they give up once they realized esports wasn't even close to being in their reach?

Being salty in (RL) pvp is trendy, hip, the new meme if you will. Yes, people get mad, I'm no saint, but that it's accepted to a degree and seemingly unpunished does not a good culture make. Class balance and all that while a real thing, is still part of this game as it currently is. However, as "broken" as it is here we are, playing the game. It's like no fault insurance, you take on part of the blame simply for the act of driving, even if it's their fault. You chose to participate. It's in some ways a level of personal accountability that is lost on people. Which in turn leads to people acting "shitty" in various ways where they feel justified in doing so. Then there's the straight up trolls, etc. It is what it is, recognize you're part in it.

the problem I see is that new players (hell, I started playing a few months ago and I still can't tell for sure) can barely see what the fuck is happening and why is happening, it's easier to see some Spellbreaker just doing two hundred blades on you when you are stunned or they are going rampage, they become big and red and all the attacks have animation tells, but some builds have literally people just jumping around doing fuck all but suddenly you have 30 conditions on you while 9000 copies are attacking or your screen is full of flies and green death from necro

for you to understand what is going on have to actually play all the other classes, It feels impossible what the fuck is happening without going in-depth in some classes, which itself is fine, but after fighting like 40-50 mesmers mirage, I still don't know what the fuck is happening and I feel like this shouldn't be happening, more animations or tells (without overabundance of fucking particles) would be great, even If by chance I kill some of these builds you are thinking about I feel like I learned nothing, maybe I was lucky with a stun or an attack, don't know man

The reason for all the toxic behavior is because the game mode. Its designed for coordinated gameplay with voice communications. Instead everyone experiences it with randoms and no voice com. In fact, you might even get randoms who don't speak English at all. Conquest should be AT only. Solo/Duo Q should get a mode that requires less communication and that is actually fun to play.

How to avoid salty players, verbal toxicity

1. Go offline mode.
2. hide team/say/map chat.
3. Enjoy pvp

or be like me and just bathe in the salt and laugh, meanwhile farming ascended shards so i can get my legendary armor and go back to wvw.

This must be your first online game with competitive mod. Pro advise, ignore. They do it to get on your nervs and see your reaction.

@Mathias.9657 said:

@"Zawn.9647" said:It's because people have a need to play the most ridiculous build that ever exists so they can have fun while denying everyone else's fun. The biggest issue is that in this game, cheesy builds are super annoying compared to other games cheeses... I really think that the devs do this on purpose, they really want the game to be unbalanced - otherwise they would try to fix it. Not just do some random changes (yes. all those balance patches seems to be more random than anything else)

Idk... I think the damage is poorly designed... Every one gets too much damage, Revenant/Warriors/Guardians can crit up to 8-10kMesmers and Necros can flood you with conditions, you cleanse them just to be flooded again in the next few secondsClasses that should be damage dealers has so much sustain, disengage...

Classes meant to be high risk high reward have so little risk due to stealths/portsToughness just doesnt do enough against physical attacks... No stat to reduce condi damage...

Classes that applies torment+confusion where the counter play is to stand still and not cast anything to not die (sounds cool huh?)Dodges that ignores CC... Builds where you can press 1 or 2 buttons and wreck your opponent (thief unload and double, triple tap... scourge shrouds, reaper 2/4 for example) - imagine 2 new players on the game... 1 guy goes pistol thieve and the other tries core guardian or whatever... if the 2 are really new the thief will wreck the core guardian by just pressing "Unload" - and that shouldnt be the case

Classes that have everything going for them (quickness/high damage/high surv/stealth or condi spam/invuls/disengage/ports/clones)

the list goes on and on... i dont really think its just 1 bad design choice... its 6 years of bad design choices that led into this "omfg better punch me in the face instead of fighting this X class again"

@Aza.2105 said:The reason for all the toxic behavior is because the game mode. Its designed for coordinated gameplay with voice communications. Instead everyone experiences it with randoms and no voice com. In fact, you might even get randoms who don't speak English at all. Conquest should be AT only. Solo/Duo Q should get a mode that requires less communication and that is actually fun to play.

Well, that's not the lead dev's opinion on that matter...

Here's what @Ben Phongluangtham.1065 had to say about bringing team ranked queues to the game:

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065 said:

Will a team queue ever be an option?

That's it. Teams aren't competitive for Ranked Conquest. The rng clowfiesta that we have now, apparently is. When i read this response was the day i truly acknowledged that PvP is dead, and there's little to no chance it will ever recover.

IF ranked was deathmatch, or even stronghold (stronghold is easy to solo carry), then i'd give it a pass, although it's really nonsensical to claim that team-based games are less competitive when played with teams.But Conquest? Conquest is 70% coordination 30% individual prowess, the worse individual players in the world can beat the most mechanically talented ones easily, as long as that first team is much better coordinated. How many times have matches been won by teams with a fraction of the other team's kills, simply because of out-rotating and playing for the objectives?

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@Aza.2105 said:The reason for all the toxic behavior is because the game mode. Its designed for coordinated gameplay with voice communications. Instead everyone experiences it with randoms and no voice com. In fact, you might even get randoms who don't speak English at all. Conquest should be AT only. Solo/Duo Q should get a mode that requires less communication and that is actually fun to play.

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065 said:

Will a team queue ever be an option?

what a joke right?

they cant even do a middle ground - why cant they enable a premade vs premade? have they ever played DOTA?there's a solo queue where you will only face solo players or duo at max... and there's a "large team queue" where you can queue with 4 or 5 people and you will only face teams that have 4-5 people in a party as well

i know this would increase the queue times... but its people choice to queue for it or not lol

its such a simple design yet they cant seem to think of it (and probably would say that its too hard to implement, etc etc) - everything in this game seems hard to implement, but adding Living World season with a whole new map, items, etc is easy right?

@Zawn.9647 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@Aza.2105 said:The reason for all the toxic behavior is because the game mode. Its designed for coordinated gameplay with voice communications. Instead everyone experiences it with randoms and no voice com. In fact, you might even get randoms who don't speak English at all. Conquest should be AT only. Solo/Duo Q should get a mode that requires less communication and that is actually fun to play.

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065 said:

Will a team queue ever be an option?

I don't think they look outside of their echo chamber for inspiration... If they did, they'd have noticed that at the time they were doing the poll to remove team queue, League of Legends was creating flex queue after having removed team ranked queues for a season and realizing it doesn't work.They don't even learn with their own mistakes. Season one lost a lot of players half way because most people were tired of having to play on Arena Net's schedule. And now AT's run on a fixed schedule as well, and there's really no other way for teams to play outside that and Unranked. Not only that, but because they made Ranked a farm fest of rewards it also means that players will likely disregard their teams during ranked seasons because they want the rewards.It's all backwards like a bizarro world honestly. And the results are obvious, the Matchmaker is struggling more and more to get proper matches because there's less and less people playing, and yet, apparently everything is fine. PvP is so downplayed that the pvp team was merged with WvW and others into the "systems" team, which should give you an idea how downsized it's been getting.

the game itself isn't toxic, neither is its pvp. an online community is a bit toxic, the more so the more you get into competetivness. thats just the way it has always been. i don't like it myself, in fact i really hate it.but ultimate raging is the key - the difference is that good players rage about their own faults first and foremost. bad toxic players tell others to 'git gud' or 'uninstall' or whatever.

@Toll Booth Willie.6723 said:Being salty in (RL) pvp is trendy, hip, the new meme if you will. ...

'new meme' omegalol - the trend goes back before 'meme' even existed. being salty is the essence of pvp. never experienced any game that isn't. it's just the way it is in the world of online battles. there will always be the one player flaming his teammates

just try not to be the one who blames others without reason - i always try the good approach and teach when i see things done wrong or ask for advice if someone blames me for whatever reason. if they still want to communicate the childish way i'll ignore them or block them.

PvP is toxic because there's a sizable amount of players not understanding that pvp is not about doing big red numbers faster than your opponent, it's about communicating effectively with the players on their team, which they refuse to do unless it's to blame them for losing.

There's also little control over who you get paired with in ranked, so there's no way for the playerbase to weed out the people that are perpetually brickheaded unless they want to play in unranked or in a tournament.

Talking to your team in such a way that it helps them win the match is hard work.

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@Aza.2105 said:The reason for all the toxic behavior is because the game mode. Its designed for coordinated gameplay with voice communications. Instead everyone experiences it with randoms and no voice com. In fact, you might even get randoms who don't speak English at all. Conquest should be AT only. Solo/Duo Q should get a mode that requires less communication and that is actually fun to play.

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065 said:

Will a team queue ever be an option?

I feel the same way you do about that quote. Its disheartening. I agree with everything you are saying, its absolutely true. I thought about how stronghold would be better for solo/duo Q, but they would need to fix it first. At this point in time that is probably unlikely and its unlikely they will ever add a casual gameplay mode specifically for randoms.

@"ReaverKane.7598" said:it's really nonsensical to claim that team-based games are less competitive when played with teams.

If it is a well functioning, well populated team queue, then yes, but if the game is GW2 and your "team" queue isn't a team queue, but a mixed queue, with some flaws on top of that and then your game lacks the population to enable even vaguely reasonable matchmaking in a vaguely reasonable time frame, then it is reasonable to claim that you actually on average get better matchmaking with solo/duo queue which therefore makes it more competitive in that case.

@Sylosi.6503 said:

@"ReaverKane.7598" said:it's really nonsensical to claim that team-based games are less competitive when played with teams.

Well, League of legends is doing great with flex queue. Our own team queue was something comparable to that, and while it was available that was when PvP had the most players. Also all the feedback we had from devs (which, again, Arena Net isn't the most transparent of companies, so it was small pickings) does seem to point out that solo queuing vs teams (just like now vs duos) didn't have that much of an overall advantage. In fact the only mention to this that i can remember, and is still available, states that win rates of 5 men teams vs 5 solo players was close to 50%, but was actually higher on the side of the solo players (as in 5 random players would beat 5 man premades more often than not, although by a small margin).When we had teams, we also had enough population for the matchmaker to make the due adjustments, which it did, and it assured fairer matches.

The problem with your statement, is that, unlike what you assume, you don't get a better matchmaking. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion. The fact of the matter is, that because of a slew of poor management (chief amongst it the lack of balance, lack of teams, and pretty much no recourse against toxic behaviours like win trading, akfing and leaving) the matchmaking algorithm pretty much lost it's ability to create proper matches. Basically in 2014/15 you had a team queue that had somewhat longer waiting periods (which was alleviated after they removed it, by improvements to the algorithm, and allowing players to queue outside of the Heart of the Mists), but had almost no issues with people afking, people quitting or people trading wins. Why? Because teams kinda solve all those issues by themselves.Balance was terrible when HoT launched, probably the worse balance period in the game, and yet, with teams people were still competing in greater numbers (apparently at least) than after they removed teams, but improved the balance, because again, having teams allows people to better coordinate and side-step those issues.

You just have to look at ATs (which aren't a viable alternative to a ranked queue, btw) and realize how teams pretty much sort out most of the issues with a competitive game mode.The lack of population is in part a result of the removal of team pvp, not the contributing factor for that decision. That decision was made as a part of a series of misguided changes designed to attract PvE players into playing PvP. The issue with this, is that PvE players will only play PvP until they either get the rewards or realize how hard it is to get the rewards and leave. (Just somewhat recently we could see this in action when they released the Legendary back on WvW). Sure some people will be retained if the game mode is healthy, but those people would likely gravitate towards it sooner or later, the overabundance of rewards that accompanied leagues is also a very likely factor contributing towards the loss of players by attracting people more likely to adopt a "i'm just here for the rewards" mindset, which is not strictly conducive to them being a proper participant in PvP. People that don't really care about the competitive facet and are there just for the loot, are more likely to AFK, to tilt, to not care about mechanics and strategy, which in turn will sour the enjoyment of people that do care for all these things, and the competitive part.

By removing pre-made teams from the game, and thus enforcing these less engaged people onto the more competitive players, that frustrates both players, and breeds toxicity, which ends up pushing people away from the game. Add to this the short lived seasons that press players into playing very frequently, the shoddy balance, and you're just exacerbating that feeling, and people end up quitting. That leads to a lower population, which makes it more likely for the matchmaker to place you with the less interested parties, and this just creates a snowball effect that is quite apparent, at least from looking at forum posts, since i've stopped playing PvP entirely (not because i didn't enjoy it, but because it's become a mockery of what it used to be, and i play this to have fun, not to endure 10-15 minutes of gnashing my teeth because 2/5 of my team mates are AFK, or feeding, or just making it worse for the rest of the team.

This game is no place for somebody with any kind of mental illness. Not all people can just "grow thick skin". Anet is 100% to blame for the environment they have created here. Not only from having maps that need highly coordinated teams to effectively play, but they absolutely refuse to give any sort of lengthy ban to players who are increasingly toxic.

If your game is suffering that badly that you can't afford to ban players to create a healthy environment to play in, maybe it's time to just shut down the servers. People have been complaining about the same things for years and it's just back and forth like a see-saw. They don't actually try to fix the problems. Starting with lengthy bans for those who tell others to go kill themselves instead of a day, or week suspension if anything at all.

I am toxic in this game A LOT more often than I have ever been in any game in my 20 years of multiplayer experience.

And there is one reason:

GW2 is breaking the "Fun to play and fun to play against" rule with every single addon they release and it takes years for them to fix just about 50% of that cheese and imbalance mess they created.

Period!

It's not about matchmaking. GW1 had no matchmaking at all and was nowhere near as frustrating. Even when our random team was matched against a Top 5 team, it was always fun. Unfortunately the general combat mechanic in its greatness has no competition in the mmorpg market. This hinders me from uninstalling this game and never look back.

@Rufo.3716 said:Starting with lengthy bans for those who tell others to go kill themselves instead of a day, or week suspension if anything at all.They would decimate the PvP / WvW population by at least 50% and kill their playerbase. These game modes are horribly frustrating sometimes and they know that.